American City Bank delays again!

This delay is totally our fault. They came to do an audit and it appears that we store some of their data in plain text, I don't know all the details but apparently Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir was supposed to build out some components that only partially got completed. When I say partially, I mean it was a basic pass through.

Long and short if it, he spend many hours with Constantine and Henry this week. I think Constantine is at the end of this rod with him. I also sawhim and Euro-Fool plotting, they always seem to go to another floor and then draw on whiteboards that can't be seen from the outside which are always clean (I checked).

I get the feeling that something big is going to happen again. It upsets me, since we have trying to pull it together since the layoffs. Why does the management team hate Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir? He is the only true leader here.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 179 lbs

Guns on release night!

So I had my first release night, it was a pretty awesome experience. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir asked me to fill in, he wanted a night off.

So we gathered in the board room, its full of Aeron chairs, its a pretty sweet set up. On the projector they were displaying the Flight Plan for the night work. Down one side the Operations team were all positioned. Apparently DJ likes them in order of seniority. The Scary-Ops-Guy was leading the charge, playing AC/DC on his MacBook Pro. Apart from that the only thing you could here was the sound of fingers on keyboards. I broke the silence to make a joke but was told to "Shut the F**k up". I thought they had some sort of Vulcan mind-melt since there was no talking, but I was told that they use IRC. I laughed at that, boy we should all go day to 28k dial-up and AOL, like that's dinosaur technology!

You don't mess with the Ops guys. Scary-Ops-Guy was actually in Desert Storm and is a leading light in the "Open Carry" movement in the Bay Area. Its all about the right to carry arms and all the NRA horse shit, but I did not like to make that point sitting opposite a guy with a Magnum in a un-clipped holster.As I understand it, the guns are not supposed to be loaded, but I was not going to push my luck and find out.

The only project manager left is a huge NRA fan, he screen saver is actually an AK47 or something. He was thumbing through the Flight Plan so I figured I better leave him alone as well.

Things started well, but the food was late. Can you believe that these guys get food, no wonder Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir always is here for release night! They had a really nice pizza from "I Love Charlotte, NC". It came with deep fried pickles and grits on the side. Yummy.

After one of the DBA trashed the production database and the DBA team spent the first hour trying to recover the database, things went pretty smoothly. Funny, they were super quite until Scary-Ops-Guy asked "What the F**k are you guys so busy with"... then the shit hit the fan.

Our code went out smooth, as I'm told by Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir always happens. Roll on the next release night!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 1 nights (pizza on release night!)
Weight : 177 lbs

American City Bank does not go live!

Wow. Crazy few weeks. Everybody has been focusing on making the American City Bank launch successful. Lots of late nights, a whole team baby sitting the call each day and managing their issues. Lots of bugs, lots of missing requirements. I have a friend working on the code, sounds like they are writing it as they go along, nobody seems to have a clue how the API contracts should work. They are nailed down in terms of XML, but not the behaviors. I mean, how COBOL is that? They all sound like a bunch of old guys in some brown walled, nondescript office in Delaware. The peons don't work in the high end Manhattan office!

Finally American City Bank called off the launch. Apparently, they have some deal with their staff that they don't launch a product in a month with a Friday 13th, so we have to push out the launch past Feb.

Was looking forward to the mind bending party that Henry had promised. He said he would take "only the engineers" to Gary Danko in SF, this was later downgraded to PF Chang's in Palo Alto, which to be honest I super happy about. Who does not love PF Chang!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 176 lbs

Moonlighting!

Ops guys are weird at the best of times. They work strange hours, act weird and have a big interest in guns. Generally you should not mess with them, especially if its open carry week.

So I'm not surprised that DJ ever question the fact that one of his guys volunteered for night shift work. Its kind of easy, since there are not customer to piss off if you take out a server or database and sometimes pull a wire on the wrong switch. Its all scheduled so the customer have low expectations. Somebody has even written a script that you can cut & paste from.

But then there's the rub. Dude was actually working for a competitor, some outfit in Dallas during the day and then doing work for us during the night. He was getting double pay for doing the same thing twice. Explains why you never got on answer on the pager when he was on duty, always claimed to be sleeping. We all heard Henry screaming down here in the dungeons all the way from the Management Tower.

Super dumb for DJ letting this slide. But then something super crazy happened. They kept him on and doubled his pay, the theory was that the company could not cut is wages because he was in too deep with the Chinese Mafia. Cutting his wage was like giving him a death sentence and that is totally bad karma. So dude is still here and making more money than ever! Whoever said Henry is not a humanitarian is on crack.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 177 lbs